Last Friday, Rebecca had the boys somewhere and I was sitting in the back yard thinking about Jake not yet being potty trained and Will not yet knowing how to ride a bike. So, damn it, I went into the garage and took off those freaking training wheels with a single mission on my mind: I WILL teach Will how to ride a bike; he WILL learn how to do it today. Man, I was pumped. This was going to be it. This was going to be great.
They got home from wherever they were and came inside. I probably freaked Will out with my expression of wild enthusiasm as I exclaimed, "Will, I'm going to teach you how to ride a bike today! ARE YOU READY? YEAH!" Will fed off my energy and said, "OKAY!" So, we pulled the bike out and he got on.
I made a couple mistakes.
I first shouldn't have worn flip-flops. They make for a difficult time for a 6'2.5" man running while bent over a small bike with a novice, little rider trying two wheels for the first time. I also shouldn't have assumed that this little boy, who had never once ridden a bike without help, would suddenly understand all the little mechanical things, like keeping his head and eyes forward without looking behind him to make sure I was still there.
Avoiding crashes, Will successfully accomplished a full second of unassisted riding. Stepping back from myself, I told Will what a great job he did. I realized my second (okay, third) mistake was in forgetting that, no matter the age, a person is his own, with his own motivations, regardless of the desire or will I wish to affect on him to do something new. I learned this lesson about adults a long time ago, but it was a gentle reminder to me that he and Jake will do things on their own time...
...when they're ready.
Tuesday, April 21, 2009
Saturday, April 18, 2009
The End of Vacation
Today is the last Saturday in my two-week spring vacation. This time off has served to rejuvenate my juvenile sensibilities, which were starting to become a little crotchety. I needed time to reclaim that "peace" of me from which my job and life had been chipping. It's difficult to characterize my frame of mind two weeks ago; perhaps the best word for it was "damaged." Although I lament the end of the break, I feel more enthusiastic about returning to work than I have in a long time. Maybe the thought of having only another five or six weeks left in the school year fuels me, or it could be the anticipation of catching up with coworkers. Maybe I look forward to carving another year-notch in the career belt signaling the increasing permanence and comfort I find in making the right career choice.
It's odd how yesterday's problems seem to drift out of permanence and the cynical affect they work on the mind become more like a hazy memory, like looking back over a bridge you've just crossed only to find an encroaching fog blur your vision of the other side. They are often replaced by today's seemingly insurmountable problems which tend to effect a comparatively Everest-esque dominance over those hilly issues of yesteryear. However, it's good to have moments like these--like what I experience today--from which I gain a little more perspective on today and yesterday and see them as having equal significance at their respective times in my life.
I know it's only a moment in time, and perhaps a brief reprieve, but I want to capture this moment before it slips away. In another week, the realities and responsibilities will catch up and my cloud-like perspective may leave me.
But not right now.
It's odd how yesterday's problems seem to drift out of permanence and the cynical affect they work on the mind become more like a hazy memory, like looking back over a bridge you've just crossed only to find an encroaching fog blur your vision of the other side. They are often replaced by today's seemingly insurmountable problems which tend to effect a comparatively Everest-esque dominance over those hilly issues of yesteryear. However, it's good to have moments like these--like what I experience today--from which I gain a little more perspective on today and yesterday and see them as having equal significance at their respective times in my life.
I know it's only a moment in time, and perhaps a brief reprieve, but I want to capture this moment before it slips away. In another week, the realities and responsibilities will catch up and my cloud-like perspective may leave me.
But not right now.
Friday, April 17, 2009
my alternate universe (created and posted 3/11/09)
Do you ever get the feeling you're living in an alternate world, where the one you thought you occupied kept moving straight ahead and you took a left turn down some back alley leading to who-knows-where?
Today was a weird day. I woke up to find a sig alert on my route to work, the cause of which involved some wild horses and several cars. It didn't end well for a driver and some of the horses. So, at 6:10 this morning, I jumped in the shower fully expecting to be hours on the road. I could feel the muscles in my neck and jaw tightening. Although I was only delayed about five minutes, throughout the day I couldn't shake the tension, and my students didn't help to ease it.
Sometimes, you set expectations for yourself about how a certain day or event will go. The planning you put into it manifests itself the way you intended, but you still feel ill at-ease because of some ambient factor for which you had not accounted: an interaction, an awkward statement or moment, or a strange look on a face. Those are the moments when you feel like a stranger in your own land, when what you thought of as a safe, comfortable setting suddenly turns prickly and you feel unwelcome.
That has been my day.
Today was a weird day. I woke up to find a sig alert on my route to work, the cause of which involved some wild horses and several cars. It didn't end well for a driver and some of the horses. So, at 6:10 this morning, I jumped in the shower fully expecting to be hours on the road. I could feel the muscles in my neck and jaw tightening. Although I was only delayed about five minutes, throughout the day I couldn't shake the tension, and my students didn't help to ease it.
Sometimes, you set expectations for yourself about how a certain day or event will go. The planning you put into it manifests itself the way you intended, but you still feel ill at-ease because of some ambient factor for which you had not accounted: an interaction, an awkward statement or moment, or a strange look on a face. Those are the moments when you feel like a stranger in your own land, when what you thought of as a safe, comfortable setting suddenly turns prickly and you feel unwelcome.
That has been my day.
a new short story idea (created and posted 2/16/09)
In another place and time there were the lighted forests of green, dripping with morning dew reflected in the crisp brilliance of the spring sun. A sky so blue and cool and warm all at once held the promise of Possibility.
He, in his dim apartment in the wintry-gray city, the streets of which were lined with the edifices of single-minded focus and grubby, greedy desire, often wished himself to this other place in the spring of its awakening. In this other place, which would present itself to him in dreams of such astonishing lucidity as to make him swear reality had reborn, finality was not a word in any being's vocabulary; permanence only fluttered here and there as those who gravitated toward its optimistic promise grabbed on and held as a small child will its protective mother...(to possibly be continually worked-on and probably never completed)
He, in his dim apartment in the wintry-gray city, the streets of which were lined with the edifices of single-minded focus and grubby, greedy desire, often wished himself to this other place in the spring of its awakening. In this other place, which would present itself to him in dreams of such astonishing lucidity as to make him swear reality had reborn, finality was not a word in any being's vocabulary; permanence only fluttered here and there as those who gravitated toward its optimistic promise grabbed on and held as a small child will its protective mother...(to possibly be continually worked-on and probably never completed)
water over sand (created and posted 1/31/09)
Its range, a vast opal-blue set against a backdrop of strato-cumulus
A never ending reach of possibility and memory, dripping of the end in the imagination of an explorer--
Undulating manifestations of tidal pull and inertia as its rolling power glides over soft-bed universes--
An organic being sways under false pretense, imagining its meager hold on this aquatic reality as more power than possible.
He pushes, he pumps, he races, he catches. He flows with it and it forces him into a state of altered existence.
A never ending reach of possibility and memory, dripping of the end in the imagination of an explorer--
Undulating manifestations of tidal pull and inertia as its rolling power glides over soft-bed universes--
An organic being sways under false pretense, imagining its meager hold on this aquatic reality as more power than possible.
He pushes, he pumps, he races, he catches. He flows with it and it forces him into a state of altered existence.
Some of Jake's Words (posted 11/10/08)
I got a late start on these, but here are some of Jake's words for things, as of 23 months:
yogurt: hey-goat
strawberry: straw-bee
Batman: sam-man
Indiana Jones: Indy-on-joan, or a-rindy-doan
pineapple: (pause)_apple
pumpkin: puck-in
Star Wars: saw-was
game: gay
please: fleas
thank you: tay-too
okay: o-tay (just like Buckwheat)
I think I'll keep adding to this post as a record more words. It's really too bad this is all I've written down. I also wish I could capture in this blog his perfect renditions of the themes to the Star Wars and Indiana Jones movies. He's spot-on.
yogurt: hey-goat
strawberry: straw-bee
Batman: sam-man
Indiana Jones: Indy-on-joan, or a-rindy-doan
pineapple: (pause)_apple
pumpkin: puck-in
Star Wars: saw-was
game: gay
please: fleas
thank you: tay-too
okay: o-tay (just like Buckwheat)
I think I'll keep adding to this post as a record more words. It's really too bad this is all I've written down. I also wish I could capture in this blog his perfect renditions of the themes to the Star Wars and Indiana Jones movies. He's spot-on.
The Universe and the Atom (created and posted 9/30/08)
The next I was an atom, infinitely small and insecure within a vast expanse of seeming nothingness. I spoke uncertainty, and uncertainty answered, neither confirming nor denying my place in the universe that replaced me. I now lived by rules with which I was unfamiliar and things belonging to other orders and hierarchies.
My core caved in a little and I choked and shrank.
The Fire (A short story I wrote and posted 9/29/08)
The Fire
He lit the match.
The dew.
Those first tentative flickers were a lifetime of uncertainty as he tried to nurture the tiny flame.
The breeze.
A shaky moment passed when the match nearly went out--his last one. The trick was getting that morsel of heat from point A, ignition, to point B, kindling. But the span across these two points, merely a foot, may as well have been an astronomical unit.
The darkness.
He focused on that spasm of light in that second immediately following ignition. Doubt began to set in. When he had struck the match, he had been so certain, so sure of himself, that the thought of failing, of being left out in the cold, had been impossible. Now that the impossibility gave in to plausibility, he wondered how he had allowed himself to be so foolish, careless.
The chill.
He'd been through this before; why hadn't he learned his lesson by now?
The flame began to burn hot and blue on the tip of the wooden, strike-anywhere match. Instead of striking it just anywhere, he had carefully chosen just the right rock with the perfect texture. He had waited for just the right moment, lest he strike before he was ready. Of course, he now realized, this had all been an illusion. There was never a perfect place, nor a perfect time. You took your chance and either wound up with warmth and light, or chill and darkness, he thought to himself.
He thought about all this in the two seconds following the first second.
The stillness.
Now the match really started to burn strongly. He regained his confidence and began moving the flame toward the kindling. It--the little flame--resisted the damp air and a sudden, slightly-rustling breeze. The first thing, of course, was that he shouldn't have been out here to begin with. The season had changed for the colder and the remoteness of the place created the potential for isolation. It might be a self-inflicted isolation, but, once alone, what was the difference? His craving to know was his strength and his weakness. It propelled him forward into new territories and the unknown; this time, it propelled him toward the possibility of the ultimate unknown territory. (Death was always a possibility, but it was a little more dangerous this time.) To him, home was a resting place where he resumed contact with the real world, if it could be called that (or was this the real world and all else simply insignificant actions in which people engaged to pass the time?). But home was also a tough place to stay for a man with a restless nature.
The match held his furrowed gaze as it tried to reassure him that, yes, there would be fire and, no, he wouldn't freeze or be left in the dark. It seemed to suggest to him that all he had to do was protect and nurture its flame and it would give him all that he was missing.
He missed warmth.
The snow.
He missed light.
The new moon.
The world contracted into the triangular space between the match, the kindling, and himself. The match, its flame more specifically, was his life-saver. It held all the promise of survival, of a tomorrow and a thousand futures. If he took care of it, it would repay his care a hundred-fold. If he moved too quickly or too slowly, or allowed his rapid breathing to contact it, it would abandon him and never return. He tried not to think of this, but the feat of not-thinking cause it to become central to his consciousness. Each of those milliseconds were dedicated to that sole thought--abandonment--causing him to panic a little. The flame held strong and he was once again pacified.
The match reached the kindling. He gently set it down in the center of the soft, nest-like, organic material and gave himself the impression of a lover whispering encouraging words to the other as he coaxed the flame to ignite the fuel. The flame bloomed and grew. Success. He added a couple pieces of wood--hopefully, they were dry enough.
The snow.
He looked around him, concerned about this new-yet-familiar problem. Would the weather make another attempt to intervene?
The wind.
The wood caught fire so he added a couple more logs and relaxed a little.
He began to feel the warmth. It touched his face and caressed his extremeties. He hadn't realized how violently he had been shaking (was it from the cold or something else?), but the fire soon began to do its restorative, healing work.
It was his, and his alone, and not a soul could take it from him. He stared into it; he admired its beauty, the grace in its movements, as it danced before him, filling him with awe and pleasure. He added more wood and did not notice the wall of white forming around him. He did not see the pale blanket now covering everything within his rapidly failing range of vision, previously caused be darkness, but now resulting from the encroaching blizzard. The fire remained central to his being and his attention; his existence derived meaning from it and he was ignorant of its fragility.
The temperature.
The shaking became violent again and only at this moment did he take notice of what was happening around him. He was too late. Perhaps if he had been more alert he could have done something to protect it--to avoid this. He became desperate, and the fire echoed his desperation, each one clinging to the other to escape death. The fire needed his fuel and he needed the fire's brilliance.
The blizzard.
In the remaining seconds of their lives, he could not break his gaze as his eyes clung to the final, failing ember. The snow blanketed the mound of ashes and wood and smothered him as his violent contortions gave way to the insane peeling away of clothing that accompanies hypothermia. He thought about tomorrow and a thousand futures and he felt like he was burning.
He lit the match.
The dew.
Those first tentative flickers were a lifetime of uncertainty as he tried to nurture the tiny flame.
The breeze.
A shaky moment passed when the match nearly went out--his last one. The trick was getting that morsel of heat from point A, ignition, to point B, kindling. But the span across these two points, merely a foot, may as well have been an astronomical unit.
The darkness.
He focused on that spasm of light in that second immediately following ignition. Doubt began to set in. When he had struck the match, he had been so certain, so sure of himself, that the thought of failing, of being left out in the cold, had been impossible. Now that the impossibility gave in to plausibility, he wondered how he had allowed himself to be so foolish, careless.
The chill.
He'd been through this before; why hadn't he learned his lesson by now?
The flame began to burn hot and blue on the tip of the wooden, strike-anywhere match. Instead of striking it just anywhere, he had carefully chosen just the right rock with the perfect texture. He had waited for just the right moment, lest he strike before he was ready. Of course, he now realized, this had all been an illusion. There was never a perfect place, nor a perfect time. You took your chance and either wound up with warmth and light, or chill and darkness, he thought to himself.
He thought about all this in the two seconds following the first second.
The stillness.
Now the match really started to burn strongly. He regained his confidence and began moving the flame toward the kindling. It--the little flame--resisted the damp air and a sudden, slightly-rustling breeze. The first thing, of course, was that he shouldn't have been out here to begin with. The season had changed for the colder and the remoteness of the place created the potential for isolation. It might be a self-inflicted isolation, but, once alone, what was the difference? His craving to know was his strength and his weakness. It propelled him forward into new territories and the unknown; this time, it propelled him toward the possibility of the ultimate unknown territory. (Death was always a possibility, but it was a little more dangerous this time.) To him, home was a resting place where he resumed contact with the real world, if it could be called that (or was this the real world and all else simply insignificant actions in which people engaged to pass the time?). But home was also a tough place to stay for a man with a restless nature.
The match held his furrowed gaze as it tried to reassure him that, yes, there would be fire and, no, he wouldn't freeze or be left in the dark. It seemed to suggest to him that all he had to do was protect and nurture its flame and it would give him all that he was missing.
He missed warmth.
The snow.
He missed light.
The new moon.
The world contracted into the triangular space between the match, the kindling, and himself. The match, its flame more specifically, was his life-saver. It held all the promise of survival, of a tomorrow and a thousand futures. If he took care of it, it would repay his care a hundred-fold. If he moved too quickly or too slowly, or allowed his rapid breathing to contact it, it would abandon him and never return. He tried not to think of this, but the feat of not-thinking cause it to become central to his consciousness. Each of those milliseconds were dedicated to that sole thought--abandonment--causing him to panic a little. The flame held strong and he was once again pacified.
The match reached the kindling. He gently set it down in the center of the soft, nest-like, organic material and gave himself the impression of a lover whispering encouraging words to the other as he coaxed the flame to ignite the fuel. The flame bloomed and grew. Success. He added a couple pieces of wood--hopefully, they were dry enough.
The snow.
He looked around him, concerned about this new-yet-familiar problem. Would the weather make another attempt to intervene?
The wind.
The wood caught fire so he added a couple more logs and relaxed a little.
He began to feel the warmth. It touched his face and caressed his extremeties. He hadn't realized how violently he had been shaking (was it from the cold or something else?), but the fire soon began to do its restorative, healing work.
It was his, and his alone, and not a soul could take it from him. He stared into it; he admired its beauty, the grace in its movements, as it danced before him, filling him with awe and pleasure. He added more wood and did not notice the wall of white forming around him. He did not see the pale blanket now covering everything within his rapidly failing range of vision, previously caused be darkness, but now resulting from the encroaching blizzard. The fire remained central to his being and his attention; his existence derived meaning from it and he was ignorant of its fragility.
The temperature.
The shaking became violent again and only at this moment did he take notice of what was happening around him. He was too late. Perhaps if he had been more alert he could have done something to protect it--to avoid this. He became desperate, and the fire echoed his desperation, each one clinging to the other to escape death. The fire needed his fuel and he needed the fire's brilliance.
The blizzard.
In the remaining seconds of their lives, he could not break his gaze as his eyes clung to the final, failing ember. The snow blanketed the mound of ashes and wood and smothered him as his violent contortions gave way to the insane peeling away of clothing that accompanies hypothermia. He thought about tomorrow and a thousand futures and he felt like he was burning.
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